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In René Clair’s irrepressibly romantic portrait of the crowded tenements of Paris, a street singer and a gangster vie for the love of a beautiful young woman. An international sensation upon its release, Under the Roofs of Paris is an exhilarating celebration of filmmaking.Read More »
A mysterious radio message is beamed around the world, and among the engineers who receive it are Los, the hero, and his colleague Spiridonov. Los is an individualist dreamer. Aelita is the daughter of Tuskub, the ruler of a totalitarian state on Mars in which the working class are put into cold storage when they are not needed. With a telescope, Aelita is able to watch Los. As if by telepathy, Los obsesses about being watched by her. After some hugger-mugger involving the murder of his wife and a pursuing detective, Los takes the identity of Spiridonov and builds a spaceship. With the revolutionary Gusev, he travels to Mars, but the Earthlings and Aelita are thrown into prison by the dictator. Gusev and Los begin a proletarian uprising, and Aelita offers to lead the revolution, but she then establishes her own totalitarian regime. Los is shocked by this development and attempts to stop Aelita, and then reality and fantasy become confused, and Los discovers what has really happened.Read More »
Synopsis:
What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d’Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants.Read More »
Dimitri Kirsanoff’s masterpiece “Ménilmontant” opens with a furiously fast edited axe murder that somehow foreshadows “Battleship Potemkin”. It then resolves to be a moving drama about two sisters, one of them played by Nadia Sibirskaia who is probably the most talented silent film actress next to Lillian Gish. Kirsanoff tells his poetic story without intertitles and knows exactly that the facial expressions of his actors reveal everything we have to know about the emotional states of the characters.Read More »
Synopsis
Another of Reginald Denny’s money-spinning Universal vehicles, Fast and Furious casts Denny as “speed demon” Tom Brown. Fascinated with fast roadsters, Tom enjoys nothing more than “opening up” on the highway — at least, until he’s run off the road by another reckless driver. After emerging from the hospital, Tom discovers that he’s developed a mortal fear of automobiles — in fact, he jumps three feet in the air whenever he hears a honking horn. Naturally, the outcome of the plot hinges on Tom’s willingness to man the controls of a racing car for the sake of his sweetheart Ethel (Barbara Worth). All that prevents Fast and Furious from being a “perfect” Reginald Denny picture is a moment near the climax, when our jailed hero is released from his cell when his father bribes the guard: undoubtedly, Denny’s fans would have preferred that he figure a way out of his dilemma.
Hal EricksonRead More »
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“An engineering graduate of Yale University, Theodore Case assisted Lee de Forest in developing sound-on-film called “Phonofilm.” Falling out with de Forest, Case and associate E.I. Sponable then built a laboratory behind Case’s family home in Auburn, New York, where they developed their own optical sound film system. Sold to William Fox, it was commercially exploited as “Movietone” with sensational results.” —David ShepardRead More »
Synopsis:
What is the perfect body – and how do you get it? People were already grappling with these questions 100 years ago. Wilhelm Prager’s and Nicholas Kaufmann’s documentary “Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit” (Ways to Strength and Beauty), filmed in 1925 for the UFA cultural department, first criticises modern society, which weakens and deforms the human body through industrial work and office activities. According to the motto “A healthy mind lives in a healthy body”, the didactically prepared educational film aims in six chapters at a re-appropriation of a physical ideal state according to the model of antiquity and propagates above all physical training for this purpose.Read More »
The film follows two mountain enthusiasts, battling through a glacier areain the Swiss mountains, the sublime beauty of the film is effectively staged.The attention will be paid equally to the contemplation of nature, such as theMountain sports on his then latest technical standard And it&’s also about a newform of natural experience thanks to the film and cinema technology that enablesa wide audience to look at then still little-known mountain tops for the first timeRead More »
Montage of different sequences reconstructing the three-color additive synthesis process patented by Audibert.Read More »